Cloudcast

Repost: Private Clouds Are A Fix, Not The Future

January 14th, 2010 Posted in Cloud Computing | No Comments »

An excellent post from Alistair Croll today ‘Private Clouds Are A Fix, Not The Future’. Today we see companies moving low risk, dynamic workloads to the cloud, but as Alistair points out, in the not-so-distant-future, we’ll see a large chunk of IT capacity moving to providers than can provide more agility and cost savings than [...]

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5 Points To Make When Your CEO Cries Cloud

January 11th, 2010 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

I saw an interesting article today in Information Week (click here to view) discussing how to respond to execs when they ask what your cloud strategy is. We’re seeing many companies come to us after a CEO and/or CIO has pushed their teams to think how cloud computing can be used in their organization. A [...]

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2010 Cloud Computing Predictions: The Year of Realism

November 24th, 2009 Posted in Cloud Computing | No Comments »

2010 Cloud Computing Predictions: The Year of Realism
The buzz around cloud computing reached fever pitch this year, culminating in Gartner placing cloud computing at the peak of its hype cycle in July. We saw controversy around the Open Cloud Manifesto, the federal government getting into cloud computing with apps.gov, and almost every IT vendor trying [...]

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Skytap Brings Real-Time Team Collaboration and Role-Based Security Policies to the Cloud

November 9th, 2009 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

Today we announced the release of innovative new capabilities that enable users to collaborate over the Web using cloud-based virtual data centers (VDCs). In the same way solutions such as SharePoint and WebEx enable teams to collaborate on documents, Skytap enables teams to collaborate on complex IT environments to deliver business initiatives faster and more [...]

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Skytap vs. Infrastructure-as-a-Service

November 9th, 2009 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

We often get the question about how Skytap stacks up against ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ vendors. We’ve put together a quick summary of Skytap vs. Amazon EC2 vs. Azure vs. Rackspace so you can see how different we are, esp. for dynamic IT environments and labs. Although Azure technically isn’t a ‘IaaS’ vendor, many folks are starting to [...]

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Are All Clouds Equal and Ready for Enterprise IT Workloads?

November 9th, 2009 Posted in Cloud Computing | No Comments »

Lots of enterprises are evaluating external clouds, such as Skytap and Amazon EC2, to off-load their dynamic IT workloads. Top candidates include dev/test, IT prototyping and application migration environments. These can account for 35% or more of IT infrastructure and offer immediate opportunities for cost savings because (1) they are often underutilized due to uneven [...]

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Skytap’s ISV Customers Reach 100,000 Software Demo Milestone

October 26th, 2009 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

Today we announced that numerous software vendors, including Acresso, HP, OpenText, and SchemaLogic, have collectively delivered over 100,000 software demos and proof of concepts (POCs) to their customers using Skytap’s cloud platform. Similar to hosting an online meeting, Skytap allows customers to view a demo or complete a POC engagement whether they are in the [...]

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Lab Management: In-House or Cloud?

October 16th, 2009 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

Over the last couple of years, we’ve spent lots of time working with prospects as they make the decision whether to build their own lab infrastructure (using vendors such as VMware lab manager, VMlogix, Surgient or the upcoming Microsoft Test and Lab Manager) or choose Skytap’s cloud-based lab. There are situations where either approach can [...]

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SCREENCAST: Developer Multi-Tasking in the Cloud

October 15th, 2009 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

Ever been in the situation where you’re in the middle of developing some code,  a new high priority work item / bug arrives you need to deal with, but you don’t want to switch out your dev stack and lose your current work state? There’s lots of talk about using the cloud for testing, [...]

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Participate in voke’s Virtual Lab Management Survey

October 6th, 2009 Posted in Virtual Lab Automation and Management | No Comments »

Theresa Lanowitz of voke, inc.,  is conducting research on usage and best practices of virtual lab technologies. If you want to share your experiences, click on this link to participate. The best part is everyone that participates receives a copy of the finished research report
Check out Theresa’s blog for more information…
Cheers
Ian

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